Raspberry Pi

I got one a while ago for the same purpose. Unfortunately it was (still is?) useless as a media center as nearly everything I tried to play back was extremely choppy (SD content), wouldn't even start (720p content), or would freeze the Pi (1080p content). I haven't even tried to stream media to for a few months now, I've been using it for emulation of older consoles like the SNES and Genesis, and handhelds through the GBA. I don't know if it's still terrible as a media center, but you might want to have alternate uses for it before ordering.

Also it doesn't like adapters, so make sure you have a full size SD card of at least two gigabytes.

 

KDH, when you tried its media capabilities did you try it with the openelec linux distro or not?

 

The GPU drivers (which handle the video decoding) are still under development, I haven't tried xbmc but I think it should still handle a bunch of codec fine as long as you use the latest version of the software and Raspberry-pi firmware.
MPEG-2 and VC-1 hardware decoding codec are available but you need to pay a licence for them, more info are available on the official website and forum.

 

IIRC, it should support hardware decoding up to 1080p. So I guess it's all a matter of kernel and software support.

Phew, I was going to buy one too for the same purpose. Luckily I went for a ultracheapo $99 tablet which can read L5.1 1080p h264s without a single hitch.

 

Actually I couldn't get that one to run, I was using RaspBMC.

But again, I haven't tried it in a few months, using it instead for emulation. For all I know it's the best solution availible for under $50 by this point. And I do wholly recommend getting a Raspberry Pi, all I'm saying is make sure you have more than one use in mind, just in case it doesn't immediately do what you want it to.

 

How good is emulation of retro systems on it BTW?
And does it come with a TV out?

 

It's absolutely fantastic for SNES, Genesis, GBA, and anything prior to that. It has a RertoArch port now, so I assume it handles all of the RA cores well, but I haven't installed that yet. I haven't seen anything related to N64 emulation on it, but PSX emulation looks promising and will probably be what I set up after RetroArch.

Also in addition to the HDMI out it has a composite video out so you can connect it to older TVs.

 

Okay, so I'm thinking of getting a Raspberry Pi. Thing is I wanna add it inside the DSi and make it into a retro gaming console on the go with RetroPie. Thing is that Iwanna know how to get it to go inside of it but keep the bottom touch screen as a keyboard?

 

Should just start a separate thread, this thread is 8 years old.